On Ocean

Hello, friends and random Readers, please forgive my absence in which another stomach thing had to happen to me, but I am now back on solids and back to the writing practice. In the interim I had the opportunity to consume some serious TV, and like a salve to my soul I found the 2025 National Geographic David Attenborough collab on Disney+, called Ocean.

I’ve watched it twice now, trying to absorb every syllable of Sir David’s living wisdom. I won’t lie, I sobbed through most of it the first time. These documentaries work on me–the combination of animal vistas and soaring string music with Attenborough’s 99 year voice alongside it set me off! The sadness at the overfishing of our ocean and destruction of ecosystems goes deep to the core of me! The joy of loving the creatures beneath the sea fills me up! It is a sensory experience that is so familiar and safe at this point that it often lulls me to sleep unintentionally.

The documentary is a really great overview of the high-level concepts that have a huge impact on humanity with regard to our ocean. Attenborough kindly suggests that we all share it, which sounds lovely until you learn of the way this human tribe have treated our oceans over the past century during Sir David’s life. The film brings you up high with biological diversity and balance of the ocean, the most unexplored place on Earth, and then knocks you down with chilling footage of bottom trawling fishing practices that dredge for stupid scallops.

Those that know me probably know that I don’t eat fish, or anything that comes out of the ocean really. When I was a kid I would joke that I was a mermaid and that it would be cannibalism, which isn’t as funny as I thought it was at the time. I really loved fish, though, and preferred not to eat them. I’ve probably had fish five times in my entire life, which I realise is upsetting to some and that I am missing out on some valuable nutrition and oils available in fish. But the idea of eating a crab, scallop, lobster, or shrimp is genuinely disturbing to me. They are underwater insects that you suck the insides out of, which frankly just does not appeal to me. Clams! Urchins! You are eating aliens!

So while watching these fishing vessels rape the floor of the ocean for the asshole of a shell to eat, I get pretty worked up. I support eating fish that you catch or that you buy from a guy who just fished them out for you. I do not support the bulk of commercial fishing that is subsidised by governments to feed populations too far removed from the sea. Just watch the documentary if you want to see the aftermath of these legal practices that completely destroy the environment around them.

One amazing fact from the doc is the impact that plankton and algae have on the air we breathe, as they trap a large amount of carbon and produce half of our breathable oxygen. That’s wild!

I have been lucky in my life to visit the Great Barrier Reef once already, and now that I am based in Australia, I hope that I will someday make it back for a visit. When I went in 2015, we were able to dive with a ton of fish, rays, and black tipped reef sharks. It was one of my favourite lifetime experiences and we got engaged right afterwards1! We stayed at the Lizard Island Resort, which is next to the main research station of the GBR. I don’t have any of my underwater photos somehow, but here’s some of the sweet hermit crabs that littered the shoreline.

Shortly after–and I swear not as a result of–my visit, there was a coral bleaching event in the Great Barrier Reef that it has not and may not recover from. The documentary reveals that coral could be extinct in the next thirty years. I highly recommend that you find a bit of coral to meet before they are gone. I did a project in college over 10 years ago about ocean acidification, and the state of the ocean now is even worse than what was projected at the time.

What keeps me hopeful is solely the fact that Sir Attenborough himself has not given up that we can still save our oceans. He points out ocean protection projects that have been successful at restabilising aquatic populations around them. He begs for more protected areas so that fish have the opportunity to flourish and spill over into fished zones.

It is difficult to be optimistic about the ocean, and the larger world, when I think about the future that my children are in store for. I worry that unless it is made a priority worldwide that the abuse will continue to disrupt the lifecycles of these amazing, prehistoric creatures. Turtles and sharks survived the dinosaurs, but will they survive us? The footage of them caught in nets and strung up on hooks is more haunting to me than any harm a straw ever caused.

Think about how so many people and regulatory bodies suddenly decided that straws were bad for sea turtles, which I do not doubt is true, and now we have shitty paper straws across multiple nations. Imagine if that sort of action was taken to protect ocean animals on a larger scale! If people only ate local sea meats, these fishing industries would not have a need to exist.

Apparently this came out in June but I am late to the game, but if you want to watch something moving that could teach you a few fun animal facts along the way, I highly recommend falling asleep to the Ocean film on Disney+ right now. Thank god National Geographic has stayed amazing through my whole life. What a relief to depend on something for factual information in this age.

Thank you, dear Reader, for another episode exalting the hero of my heart, the only man I truly respect, the purest soul I have ever encountered: Sir David Attenborough. Please check on me if something happens to him, because I am not really prepared for the end of my lifetime relationship with this soothing being.